As more and more American troops are being sent back to Iraq for a second helping, the U.S. military death toll took a tragic jump up to 1111 today.

While a new Fin/What-We-Know video is set for release later today, here's a couple of quick hit videos in the mean time, courtesy of Brain Duffy's "No Bush in '04" from the past coupla days to a look at and pass around in the meantime:

In an item I posted back in August, I mentioned that Michael Moore had video footage of then-nominee for CIA Director, Porter Goss, saying "I couldn't get a job with CIA today. I am not qualified..." etc.

Just last night, reader "G" (Email address is in the comment, but I'll be kind enough to not post it here) had this to say:

WOW, I GUESS THERE REALLY IS AN ARGUMENT THAT SOME PEOPLE SHOULDNT VOTE. YOURE ONE OF THEM. MAYBE YOU SHOULD DO SOME RESEARCH. MOORE'S FILM IS FABRICATED FROM START TO FINISH, AND THE SLEAZY TRICKS HE PULLS DESTROY ALL CREDIBILITY. HE BELONGS IS JAIL. WERE THIS AN EARLIER TIME, HED BE SWINGING FROM A TREE.

In still more Internets related news...Access to the official GeorgeWBush.com campaign site has been apparently cut off, as of Monday, to all those pesky foreign countries, according to this report from Netcraft.

While non-US citizens may be grateful for this, in a cruel bit of revenge to our terror-loving neighbors to the North, reports are that Canadians are still allowed to visit the site. Sorry Canuks! But just 5 more days of this crap and your long national nightmare-by-proxy should finally be over.

Since the original posters of this video clip, TexansForTruth.org, seem to be down now that Drudge has linked to them, I'll host it here for a moment --- at least until too many folks notice and bandwidth demand knocks me out as well.

This apparently was taken during Bush's term as Governor, after he was "born again". Lovely.

(Clip sent in by Fin who captured it in time. I'll also take the opportunity to mention that Fin has another kick ass video to release shortly that tops even his awesome powerful "Start Over!" ad. More on that soon!)

The insurgents probably are using weapons and ammunition looted from the nearby Qa-Qaa complex, a 3-mile by 3-mile weapons-storage facility about 25 miles southwest of Baghdad, said Maj. Brian Neil, operations officer for the 2nd Battalion, 2nd Marine Regiment, which initially patrolled the area.

The facility was bombed during last year's invasion and then left unguarded, Neil said. "There's definitely no shortage of weapons around here," he said.

Why does U.S. Maj. Brian Neil hate America?

UPDATE: My final line there should have instead used Bush's quote today about Kerry. To wit...

Why is U.S. Maj. Brian Neil "denigrating the actions of our troops and commanders in the field without knowing the facts?"

A U.S. military unit that reached a munitions storage installation after the invasion of Iraq had no orders to search or secure the site, where officials say nearly 400 tons of explosives have vanished.

Looters were already throughout the Al-Qaqaa installation south of Baghdad when troops from the 101st Airborne Division's 2nd Brigade arrived at the site a day or so after other coalition troops seized the capital on April 9, 2003, Lt. Col. Fred Wellman, deputy public affairs officer for the unit, told The Associated Press.
...
''Orders were not given from higher to search or to secure the facility or to search for HE type munitions, as they (high-explosive weapons) were everywhere in Iraq,'' he wrote.
...
A U.N. official said Al-Qaqaa installation was believed to be the only site in Iraq where high explosives such as HMX, RDX and PETN were stored. When Iraq declared the explosives after the 1991 Gulf War, IAEA experts concentrated them at Al-Qaqaa so they could be monitored by U.N. nuclear inspectors, the official said, speaking on condition of anonymity.
...
AP Correspondent Chris Tomlinson, who was embedded with the 3rd Infantry but didn't go to Al-Qaqaa, described the search of Iraqi military facilities south of Baghdad as brief, cursory missions to seek out hostile troops, not to inventory or secure weapons.

The enormous size of the bases, the rapid pace of the advance on Baghdad and a limited number of troops made it impossible for U.S. commanders to allocate any soldiers to guard any of the facilities after making a check, Tomlinson said.
...NBC correspondent Lai Ling Jew, who was with the 101st, told MSNBC that ''there wasn't a search'' of Al-Qaqaa.

''The mission that the brigade had was to get to Baghdad,'' she said. ''As far as we could tell, there was no move to secure the weapons, nothing to keep looters away.''

There's more on the specific dates of all this in the story, and as we've pointed out before Josh Marshall has pulled together all the math to make sense of it. His later coverage, is similarly reasoned and clear-headed. Inform yourself.

Determining how 380 tons of some of the highest explosives known to man (just one pound of it took down Pan Am 103) has undeniably disappeared and what has happened to them?

Or investigating whether or not this may be some kind of "Dirty Trick", as O'Reilly suggested yesterday, being grandly orchestrated somehow to take down Bush in some bizarre grand conspiracy requiring the complicit cooperation of the Iraqi Interim Government, the IAEA, the U.N., The New York Times and the Democratic party?

You tell me which one of those questions should be of more concern right now.

I had been planning to cover this a bit, but it looks like New Donkey has taken care of some of it for me:

The GOP's November Surprise
I should have known when George Will started writing columns about the dastardly threat of voter fraud that something big was in the works. And sure enough, the conservative media echo chamber is now vibrating from a cacophany of warnings that Democrats are trying to steal the presidential election by fradulently registering ineligible voters.

What's happening here is an effort to soften up the news media and the public for a truly audacious, and perhaps even desperate, gambit by the Republican Party that appears to be planned for election day: wholesale challenges to minority voters in battleground states in an effort to either (1) intimidate or demoralize likely Democratic voters, or (2) lay the groundwork for one of those Bush-v.-Gore-enabled retroactive legal actions aimed at reversing an adverse result. More likely, the aim is (3) both.

As I've mentioned here previously, when the GOP starts charging something about Democrats (e.g. "They're trying to scare voters!", "They're intolerant of free speech!", etc.), it's a virtual guarantee that it's something they are either currently doing or plan to do themselves. For years now, they've honed this pre-emptive attack on others for what they are actually doing themselves to an art form. Will the media and the voters be smart enough to recognize that this time around?

Just a quick note to mention that the BRAD BLOG has been steadily gaining traffic over the last month or two due to so many of you spreading the good word and staying involved.

Yesterday we had just under 10,000 unique visitors stop by. More importantly though, 2,500 of you were return visitors which is really most important to me. Whatever brought you here, many of you decided to come back again, and that's truly appreciated.

While it may not be "breaking news", still I never fail to grow more amazed each day at the ever lowering depths of stark and cynical politicization of this George W. Bush administration.

While I'm not old enough to have contemporaneously tracked the troubling goings-on of the Nixon administration, I must say that from what I've been able to glean over the years about them, they just don't seem to hold a candle to the slick and orchestrated campaign of top-to-bottom politicization of virtually every facet of the current administration.

Sure both Clinton and Reagan were political champs, but they just didn't seem to have the fixation on the politicization of every nook and cranny of their administration in the way the Dubya team seems have accomplished during their catastrophic failure.

As I've been dealing with various issues related to the political scrubbing and/or white-washing and/or flagrantly partisan use of the White House website over the past couple of weeks, I've come across various bits and pieces, and have received various tips from readers on all sorts of questionable and/or deceptive and/or partisan and/or downright ugly uses of Bush administration-run facilities on their portion of the tax-payer funded "Internets".

By way of just a few examples, the White House's website is one of the top destinations on all of the Internets, as it offers a treasure trove of historical and educational information, including a section specifically tailored for children. (NOTE FOR THOSE OF YOU IN BLINDFOLD LAND: We're talking about the publicly funded Whitehouse.gov site now, a different animal all together than the appropriately partisan GeorgeWBush.com campaign site!)

Yet take a look at the screenshot on the right taken from the front page of Whitehouse.gov today. There's your tax dollars at work. A historical report concluding that "President George W. Bush's first term has been among the most consequential and successful in modern times."

I'll grant them "most consequential", but "most successful in modern times"?

President Bush...has signed into law the No Child Left Behind Act, the most important Federal education reform in history.

President Bush has strongly advocated...environmental standards that are making America's water and air cleaner.

He has made civility a touchstone of his rhetoric.

Such times demand a leader of clear convictions and determination, hope and vision, integrity and the courage to act. These qualities are the hallmarks of the Bush Presidency.

President George W. Bush put forward a historically ambitious agenda and restored dignity to the office he holds...The United States is safer and stronger, more resilient and better for his efforts.

And all of that is just on the first page of the full 19 Chapter "report"!

Meanwhile, lest we forget the children, the "Kids" section of Whitehouse.gov informs the impressionable tykes that "President Bush has pledged to work in a bipartisan spirit, which means he plans to work with both Republicans and Democrats in Congress." Perhaps those plans got set aside.

In another example of rank partisanship at work on the official Whitehouse.gov website, a reader (Vic) pointed out that there is a page devoted to a short biography of each American President. And right in the middle of the text of each one of those, they've been kind enough to offer the reader a convenient set of "Related Whitehouse.gov links" (See screenshot at left for the "Whitehouse.gov related links" to Abraham Lincoln, for example.)

The bio pages for each of the 43 former (or soon-to-be former) Presidents have that same set of "related" links dropped squarely into the middle of every historic Presidential biography.

As the reader who sent the tip noted, we might give the benefit of the doubt and overlook the links to the current President and Vice-President perhaps --- but links to their wives as well?!

To be fair, we've only had two administrations so far that have even had websites. So I wondered if perhaps Bill Clinton's website was similarly as unabashedly partisan and politicized as George W. Bush's.

I looked mostly at the fifth and final version of the Clinton website, since it would have been in play during the 2000 Elections and most comparable to Bush's current site. While I found documents that discussed various positive Clinton achievements, I just didn't come across the sort of wildly unabashed campaign rhetoric that the current White House site offers readers in spades.

One enlightening, though admittedly anecdotal measure of the differences in the two administrations is revealed by comparing each administration's former (and soon-to-former) historical bio pages of past Presidents.

There are no "Whitehouse.gov related links" to Clinton, Gore and their respective wives in the middle of the Clinton versions of those pages. Though there is a link on each page to a bio for each respective President's wife on the Clinton version. The direct links to the First Ladies (other than Laura Bush, of course, who is on every page) is removed on the Bush version. Instead, the Bush site, as did the Clinton site, offers a section specifically dedicated to historical First Lady bios.

More telling, however, is the direct comparison of the biographical essays for each President. I compared each site's version for LBJ through "present".

But for a short "FUN FACT" removed from the top of each of the Clinton site's Bio pages, it looks like the Bush Administration retained the exact same texts from the Clinton years for almost every President. That says something, I'd think, of the fair and balanced treatment that the Clinton team gave to former Presidents.

So Bush 43 found no reason to change the essay that Clinton had created for Bush 41, but --- as you might guess --- they did change the text for the Clinton bio when they took over the sandbox. Appropriately, they added information that hadn't been there previously about impeachment, but many Clinton achievements were simply excised entirely. Phrases such as "he outlined a bold strategy to lift the economy through increased public and private investment while cutting $500 billion from the Federal deficit" were removed. While other descriptive phrases like "After the failure in his second year of a huge program of health care reform" were added by Team Bush.

You can compare other differences for yourself.

While all of this is not necessarily earth-shaking --- as I said, "not breaking news" --- I do find it interesting, instructive and indicative of the politicized posture the current Administration has had from Day 1 of their "Presidency" in virtually every area, large to small.

The only other differences in Presidential essays that I noticed between the two sites is the entirely lopped off final paragraph from Clinton's version of the Jimmy Carter bio. The short excised paragraph at the end which spoke of Carter's achievements after leaving the White House, such as his founding of "the nonprofit Carter Center in Atlanta to promote peace and human rights worldwide" was simply gone.

Perhaps the Bush White House decided that post-Presidential activities were a can of worms they preferred better left unopened.

Some day, if I find the stomach for it, perhaps I'll compare the First Lady bios from the Clinton and Bush sites. Though I have a feeling it's not gonna be pretty.

A helpful note to our Wingnut Readers: Before you race to your blogs in a panic to parrot the misleading Drudge/NBCNews story which tries to suggest that the 380 TONS of missing high explosives from al Qaqaa were missing before we ever got there....Before you hit the comments button here and re-type what Rush is lying to you about this morning...For once, try to educate yourself and understand the facts of the story first so you don't embarrass yourself again, and waste everybody's time. Josh Marshall --- a very good and professional reporter --- can help you avoid that mistake again. But you'll have to read him first. Please do.